The legit channels have a level of convenience now not seen in the piracy channels, because money pays for proper curation and surfacing of content.
I used Limewire back in the day. I couldn't tell you how many songs in my collection were artist credit "System of a Down." I think I had a System of a Down copy of the 1812 Overture in there somewhere.
(It is also possible that legit channels are over-counted in the data because they're easier to explicitly audit. If the error factor estimate is the same for legit and bootleg channels, the data will reach the wrong conclusions).
doesn't surprise me. most college students I've talked to recently (other than cs majors) genuinely have no idea how to pirate stuff (ie, don't even know what a torrent is). most are satisfied with the meagre selection on Spotify or even radio services like Pandora.
I am not surprised, considering that pirating songs is still the most hassle free way to listen to music, especially down here in India. Spotify isn't available due to label issues and local streaming services don't have a good selection of non-bollywood music. Now that physical media cannot be used anywhere in laptops or mobiles and youtube cannot be minimized on mobiles, the best and easy way to get music, especially western music is to pirate mp3 files and share it on usb sticks and sd cards.
Because movie studios, music labels etc. sell exclusive distribution rights to local music cartels, and many of these deals are historical and hard to get out of, e.g. maybe they were 20-30 year contracts made in the mid-90s when nobody was serious about this "Internet" thing.
Which is why Netflix has such a fragmented offering per-country, and why e.g. you might be able to technically buy some song on a CD in India, but it's not available anywhere online, or in the likes of Spotify.
That's really sad, and I understand how frustrating that can be. It used to be next to impossible to do the same in India, but things have changed a lot in the last two decades. We still have a lot of control on the currency.
I can't answer for the parent, but I'll make an assumption with an analogy.
You're on a long walk, absolutely starving and there's a strong possibility you won't get to eat for a while. A guy by the road is selling apples - with the small amount of cash you have on you, you could afford 4 or 5, enough to fill you up. Across the road there's an empty looking house set far back from the road, with an apple tree right in the yard at the front. Hundreds of apples have fallen on the ground - it's no biggie to lean over the fence and grab a handful of apples. No one is in the house, the guy selling apples isn't watching, what do you do?
Of course, you _are_ starving, and you do have some money, which you'd be prepared to spend on food. Now assume that next to the apple seller is a small cafe - the menu is vast and you can eat as much as you want of pretty much any kind of food. You pay once and if you stop in on the way back you can eat again. Now what do you do?
It's less a question of price and more that of convenience. In India most services don't have the full catalog due to old licensing issues. There is fragmentation. Which does not matter when you pirate stuff.
Thanks. I just assumed amazon, google and itunes would over the same digital catalog around the globe. I have myself mostly bought music from smaller artists via bandcamp or their personal sites, but mostly saw their albums also on these big platforms, so it didn't even occur to me their offerings could differ by country. (strictly talking about music, when looking at movies etc., even central Europe where I am located has severely limited options in comparison to the US. But then, other than music comes with mostly draconian DRM anyway.)
"Why is it not possible to buy mp3s? Amazon, play store, iTunes etc. all use no DRM to my knowledge? Or is it just a question of price?"
I was going to ask the same thing - specifically about Amazon, which sells non-DRM, standard mp3s - but it occurs to me this might only be in the United States.
What does mp3 purchasing from Amazon look like from other countries ? Just a vastly different catalog ? The same catalog but with DRM files ?
>What does mp3 purchasing from Amazon look like from other countries ?
Speaking from a UK perspective, everything I've purchased from Amazon UK has been provided as DRM-free MP3. Amazon UK (and possibly elsewhere) has an AutoRip feature where CD purchases are also added as gratis downloads. This extends to prior purchases, too – I was a bit wary about downloading some items since they were bought as gifts for people via their wishlist…and yet since I was the purchaser, I was the presumed licence holder…but didn't have the CD in my possession. The same goes for CDs that I'd bought, listened to and subsequently sold, which presumably transfers the licence to the new holder of the CD…and yet I can still download the album via Amazon Music. Tricky.
> What does mp3 purchasing from Amazon look like from other countries ? Just a vastly different catalog ? The same catalog but with DRM files ?
For Finland and most other countries, it is not possible to purchase digital music (or movies/shows, for that matter) from Amazon.
If I try to purchase an MP3 from the US site (amazon.com), I get "We were unable to process your order with the current payment information. Please click 'Continue' to select a default payment method and 1-Click address."
Clicking "Continue" just gets me back to the item page, so even the error messaging is broken. OTOH Amazon Video has a proper error message about needing a US payment method.
Amazon does offer the Amazon Music Unlimited subscription service here, though, and I believe it has a catalog comparable to other services (but I'm not a user).
> ...and local streaming services don't have a good selection of non-bollywood music
By non-Bollywood, do you mean music in other Indian languages or popular English music? Amazon Prime and Apple Music seem to have something in other languages, though nobody seems to have everything (without ads and a bad experience). Amazon Prime (with video, music and books) is Rs.999 a year, while Apple Music is Rs.120 a month.
For those not familiar with India, there are 22 official languages (you can see them on the currency notes) and about a 1000 dialects. Popular music is still mostly from movies, and the country produces more than a 1000 movies a year across different languages.
Very unusable though with stupid DRM downloads or forced streaming. Both preclude backups or reuse on multiple devices. At the very least, complicate it immensely.
Compared to that, Bandcamp is heaven. A tiny one though I'm happy to pay for.
Yeah, the DRM and the various limits (even if they look big, they're still limits...on a paid service) imposed on offline storage and the inability to move content across devices are huge bummers.
> By non-Bollywood, do you mean music in other Indian languages or popular English music?
Western music mostly. I took a gaana.com subscription to find that its rock/metal music catalogue had big holes in it. And as you said even for bollywood music the experience is not that good.
In Africa I saw these devices that were dedicated sd card file transfer devices. You plugged in two sd cards in and it had a Norton Commander-esque interface on the top for transferring files between the two. It was weird seeing such a device that wasn't a general purpose computer.
AFAICT, that's a block level duplicator. The ones I'm talking about let you copy individual files. So everyone has their own SD card, and you turn to your buddy and say "damn that's a banging tune", so you guys head down to the village tech store and the guy there lets you copy the mp3 from your buddy's card to yours using his fixed purpose file copier.
Google Play Music is there in India with their full catalog, but Google seems not to be pushing it much, and their player software is very bare bones, cannot do volume equalization in a play list for eg.
Very much agree. The only way I will ever take any discussion the legitimacy of copyright seriously is if the copyright period is reduced back to something sane like 20 years.
Except that those predate the era of music records. People are not interested in notes, they are interested in the music. Recordings of Bach and Vivaldi are still usually not in the public domain.
> Even the sheet music is still copyrighted, because you want modern notation, not photographs of the originals.
And you can very easily find them.
Most moderately well-known compositions have been transcribed into pdf using modern typography (say, with lilypond) and uploaded to imslp and similar sites.
Maybe most baroque recordings are not public domain. But you can find many good-quality recordings of any particular piece under reasonable creative commons licenses [1].
Yes. However, if the music is out of copyright that creates a free market in recordings of the music so it leads to there being budget recordings available.
Personally I am interested in the notes, so I'll point out that most of the sheet music for Bach and Vivaldi is in fact under copyright. If you want something out of copyright then you have to get a facsimile of an old edition. Or something that was typeset by an amateur, which will almost certainly be crap because typesetting music takes a lot of skill to do well.
Especially if you compare that to patented technological inventions, that often consumed much more time, effort and money to develop. These patents expire after 20 years. How can it be justified that a song that someone wrote maybe within a week keeps the copyright virtually forever?
To treat what you wrote as counterpoint to previous commenter you'd have to claim that inventors are far less knowledgeable, experienced and younger than musicians.
Not really a song might take a week or 5 mins to write but its the result of years of experience and hard work - your not going to write "September Song" at 18 are you
You would be ok with your employer using the same argument when they paid you ?
I don't think the analogy carries weight. It's true for chairs but not for all physical objects. The law steps in. Thus for example, in many countries what you do with a house is regulated by national and local laws as happens with some datasets - such as an audio/visual recording.
You mean, In what other market does the law ban competition?
Freedom should be the default, not "copyright" since it does the opposit.
In many countries te public domain was the rule and copyright was the exception until the US started pressuring nations via multilateral treaties and economic sanctions or "incentives".
Literally all of the time? If I copy something from you, that's generally 100% legal. The only other exceptions are things like patents, where the inventor/creator has to go out of their way to activate copy protections. "He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper [candle] at mine, receives light without darkening me." --Thomas Jefferson
Before 1989, copyright was also opt-in. Check out the timeline under "Notable Dates in United States Copyright" https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1a.html It's a mess of shifting categories and retroactive extensions.
Because you will eventually die, and after many years any claim that you lay to your intellectual property or creative output will cease to be relevant.
The content that we create does not exist in a vacuum- humans create for the overall good of society. Everything you see and use day-to-day is an incredible amalgamation of thoughts and ideas woven together from centuries of our past and present collective knowledge.
The notion that an individual or organization can maintain exclusive control of "intellectual property" in perpetuity stands at odds with thousands of years of human history. Modern patent and copyright law seems to have forgotten this.
Market fragmentation causes some of this. I pay for a couple of streaming services, but occasionally rip an mp3 from YouTube for things I can't find. If there was a "pay and download mp3" button on YouTube, I'd probably pay.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say part of the problem is that streaming services are not available in all countries and if they are the price is not adjusted for the income level in that country.
For instance Spotify is not available in many countries including Ukraine and India. The latter having a population of 1.3 billion people. GPM and Apple Music are better in that regard but nevertheless.
Note I didn't claim debit cards don't exist here, just that they are not very common, especially for online payments.
I personally live in Germany, in the middle of my live, with kids and a big household etc. and have never used a credit card, nor have I undergone a single situation where I needed one.
Indeed—but the labour we're talking about here, the kind regulated by copyright, is the distribution of the files; and it's the labels and artists who are employing the force of the State to enjoy the fruits of that labour performed by others for free, having given up on charging a fair rate once and up front for the actual labour of producing the content in favor of a more lucrative, albeit less moral, business model.
If you create something that can be copied endlessly at near-zero cost, and you don't want others enjoying it "for free", then you need to charge an appropriate price for the initial publication. You have every right to keep it to yourself, and to charge whatever price you deem fair in exchange for the service of revealing it to others, but once you've done that it's rightfully out of your hands.
In some places, you can buy Google Play Store credit in shops. Perhaps you could pay with cash too (my preference). I suppose that could help if such an option exists around where you live.
GPM costs around $1.2 per month in India, which is a reduced rate compared with the USA, and which I think features the same catalog available in the USA.
Why are youtube to mp3 converters illegal? I mean, it's basically just recoding a signal; I don't see how that could be an illegal action. Might as well sue me for recoding WAV to mp3 so more music fits on my phone.
Copying, any copying, is breaking copyright, if a work is copyrighted. There are some defenses you have if actually accused of copyright infringement, like fair use, but those are exceptions after you’ve been accused.
It's so ass-backwards. I mean, in the most technical sense, every ISP, routing point and whatnot upstream from me to youtube is breaking copyright by sending me the packets, since it is technically a copy of the work.
It's ass-backwards (any law that makes 40% or more of the population a potential target of financially-disruptive lawsuits is not a reasonable law), but let's not get hung up on technical aspects of copying. It's obvious that ISP routing copies, and similar types of copying, involve transient copies that are quickly discarded and not consumed by anyone. The case law actually recognizes this difference. Legally, "copying" a work means meaningful copying, not merely copying data from one place in memory to another place in memory where it stays for a while until it's freed or garbage collected and then overwritten.
This at least doesn't apply to German copyright law. There are cases which are actually explicitly allowed like the "Privatkopie" where you copy a copyrighted work for pure private purposes. So it is explicitly legal to borrow a CD from a friend and make a copy of it, unless that CD is copy protected. This copy can of course only be used by you for your private purposes.
For this reason, you are also allowed to tape the TV program.
...and yet music industry revenues are on the up again.
If you can't get something legally - because you actually can't, or because you can't afford it, it's a 'victimless crime' and you desperately want it - you'll pirate it. But I think most people are happy to pay for the convenience of everything. £10 a month for Spotify is a no brainer for me. The problem happens when (label?) greed sinks in again and the streaming services fragment with 'exclusives' on each. At that point, people end up picking one to spend their cash on, and they'll pirate or stream a shitty version on YouTube the songs they can't get on their streaming service.
You want to get more people to pay? Licence everything to everything - then the only people that will pirate are the ones that would never pay anyway. And I bet they're a smaller subset than four in ten.
Fragmentation is what causing the rise in movie and tv piracy, if I was to guess. For years piracy have been declining in Denmark, this past year is the first time is started to rise again. The same year where Netflix as been losing a ton of content.
Fragmentation is a huge problem, and I don’t understand it. Why do you care about managing your own streaming platform. Just licens everything at a price you believe to be fair and let the platforms fight to provide the best experience. As a music, TV or movie studio you’re the only one that sure to make money.
"Fragmentation is a huge problem, and I don’t understand it. Why do you care about managing your own streaming platform. Just licens everything at a price you believe to be fair and let the platforms fight to provide the best experience. As a music, TV or movie studio you’re the only one that sure to make money."
This would be amazing. Imagine picking your streaming service based on who has the best app / recommendations / social baked in (or whatever you were looking for). But from a friend that works in TV sales - the platforms fight and pay for the exclusives. If it's going to everyone - pass. That money helps film the new stuff. I guess music has an advantage in the respect that it doesn't really work like that - and it's much cheaper to record an album. That's why it's so frustrating when music services fragment.
Have music services really fragmented yet? I seem to remember some larger artists trying that, but I don't recall it being successful.
It's pretty rare that I can find something on Spotify that isn't on Google yet (or vice versa), and even then they usually catch up to each other eventually.
> Why do you care about managing your own streaming platform.
because voluntarily giving up control over your content to a monopole means you loose leverage. If 90% of all video content is on netflix, they can set the terms, not you. "we're paying half of that or we dont host it".
> Just licens everything at a price you believe to be fair
They most likely do. But if noone else is willing to pay enough, its only going to be on their own platform.
I disagree completely. Exclusive content is not to protect against netflix becoming a monopoly. it is for the studio to try to be the monopoly!
if your content has a price in the open, streaming platforms can then compete on price/quality to end user. instead, today, they compete 100% on exclusives.
Music and movies are not substitute goods. Ignoring piracy, if you have an exclusive on some content, the fans of that content will come to you instead of choosing some other work to consume.
Distribution of content is a "near-zero" cost relative to content production. However, the value of content distribution value is much higher than content. Furthermore, the value of the distribution of the content rises exponentially based on the collective set of content.
It's basically designed as a winner-take-all environment, so you have a bunch of digital fiefdoms. Or as put by Jim Barksdale on How to Make Money: "you either bundle or unbundle".
I'm not a fan of fragmentation, but you have this reversed. Fragmentation exists because it allows content producers / owners to get every possible benefit out of that content before it is generally available. This happens with books (hardcover vs. paperback), medicines (years before generics are available), video game platforms etc.
The producers are merging with content providers precisely because it allows for this maximization of revenue. It's no accident. Apple ruined it by taking 30% of most digital activity on the planet - that's where the money is at scale and you won't see a reversal until those margins start to approach zero.
If a content producer wants the most amount of profit for a known good, say a famous band, (meaning they don't need to give it away to get discovered) then you'll make sure to fragment your customers and make the people that want it most "pay" the most. It makes all kinds of sense as a producer, and it happens in every industry.
Piracy is consumers saying "this is BS" and stealing the content so they don't have to pay more - because they feel entitled to do so. Sure, "let everything be free" is a wonderful goal culturally and for consumers but the model won't win out for things in extremely high demand.
Not that long ago, the consensus was that it was the opposite that was causing piracy: bundling.
They are the two sides of the same coin, which is that people don't want to pay what the content providers want to charge. Fragmentation wouldn't be a problem if each service was 99 cents a month, and bundling wouldn't be a problem if one big service that had everything charged $10 a month. Netflix showed that the latter is true - people generally don't complain about having to pay for all the content they don't care about on Netflix because they feel that what they do watch is worth at least $10/month.
Yup, we've gone from paying $120/month for an all-in-one cable package, to paying $39/month for a handful of channels, $10/month for this one online streaming service, $15 for the other one, $30 for another set of channels, and eventually we get to the point where we're paying around the same (if not more) than the all-in-one package, but we now have to manage multiple platforms, and we most likely have less content than we had before. Fuck all that noise.
The saddest part being that the film industry is even further behind. Some contents are still totally unreachable by any legal offer outside their home country.
Taking advantage of something someone created on terms different than what they’re willing to offer it to you is not a “victimless crime.” (Just like jumping the turnstile in the subway is not a victimless crime even if there are free seats, or sneaking into a sports stadium.) At the margin it lowers the price everyone is willing to pay for the item.
People treat piracy as a victimless crime because the marginal cost of each item is zero. Imagine extending similar logic to a handbag. If you steal an LV purse you can’t afford, how do you measure damages? The $1,000 marginal cost to physically replicate the purse, or the $10,000 retail price? That basic logic doesn’t change as the marginal cost goes to zero.
The moral rationalizations don't really hold water. It's not like the music industry is out there lobbying to prevent competing content. Their whole business model is creating content that's so desirable that they are non-fungible--people won't settle for a slightly different clone. Advances in digital technology have made it so the cost to create content is lower than ever. But people don't want just any superhero movie, want to see Wonder Woman or the Avengers: Infinity War.
The music labels who decide the terms of sale didn't create the music. They're rent seeking corporations who seek to increase their profits in any way possible and bribe politicians to create artificial barriers through which they can create toll gates.
And their control is expanding. Older works that should (by historical precedent) be part of the commons remain copyrighted because of endless extensions. Practices that were once legal and common become illegal (like copying tapes vs copying CDs) or technically difficult (like recording music off the radio vs recording music off the Internet).
Fighting back and "lowering the price everyone is willing to pay" doesn't sound like a bad thing to me.
The legitimate way to lower prices in a market is to create a competing product and sell it for less money, not interfere with a creator's rights to sell their product on their terms. The music industry isn't "brib[ing] politicians" to "create artificial barriers" to people creating competing content. Indeed, it's easier than ever to compete with the record labels. Sites like YouTube offer vast opportunities for creating and distributing indie content. The only reason the record labels make any money at all is that they make content people want more than the indie content they could get elsewhere for cheaper.
Copyright is itself an artificial barrier, as is copy protection and laws like the DMCA that make copy protection a legal as well as technical barrier.
I respect your right to your opinion that poor people should be prevented from hearing or seeing something entertaining because a corporation wants more money (it's rarely the creator who makes these decisions), but that's not the only legitimate opinion.
Copyright isn't a law handed down by God; it's a fairly new legal creation on the scale of human history and its constant expansion is a major factor behind increasing inequality in the world.
The notion that ideas are products to be sold on the market instead of free thoughts to be shared is a new invention.
In fact, most of the world still doesn't believe it, which is why the US has to fight so hard to expand copyright and patent protection in other nations.
> Copyright is itself an artificial barrier, as is copy protection and laws like the DMCA that make copy protection a legal as well as technical barrier.
Yes, copyright is an artificial barrier, but a barrier to what? It's not a barrier to fair competition. It's a barrier to circumventing a creators right to bargain about the price of her creation.
Copyright itself isn't "handed down by God," but the idea that people should own the fruits of their own labor is an old one. That's all copyright is.
Copyright wasn't created to protect the fruits of the creators labor, though.
The origin of copyright was providing monopoly rights to the Stationers Guild in Britain to control printing of works under the Licensing of the Press Act 1662. So a right vested in the printers who wanted to be able to sell for much higher prices than the duplication itself justified, not the authors.
Of course this would also allow them to pay more to authors, because they would be able to amortise it over more copies, but the guild had a monopoly on printing, so it was not in any of their interests to substantially increase the proportion paid to authors - the main benefit of this monopoly was to themselves.
When parliament refused to renew it after protests because of the censorship it authorised, the Stationers Guild kept trying to push for it to be reintroduced, and first then started pushing the "authors rights" angle, leading to the Statue of Anne (Copyright Act 1710), which was the first "modern" copyright act in that it vested rights in authors.
But the idea of restricting the ability to copy to favour the creators of a work was something the printers first started pushing for their own interest because their abuse of the copyrights previously granted to them directly made it unpalatable to re-authorise those rights.
And extending the copyright on works whose creators are long dead doesn't do anything for the creators.
If copyright law wasn't serving the interests of Disney, Sony, and other big corporations, they'd be pressuring politicians to change it, rather than expand it to other countries.
What determines legitimate? There is, of course, the law. But the law has numerous limits and abilities to be exploited. To some extent, the law of the past was violated by the RIAA and others, and so nothing they do could be considered legitimate. And on a very different line of reasoning, the law can be considered only a tax and thus it is legitimate to pay the tax once enforced.
>The music industry isn't "brib[ing] politicians" to "create artificial barriers" to people creating competing content.
They don't lobby for laws that do things such as lead to YouTube creating copyright systems they can then exploit to take out competitors? Using government to capture the EM spectrum so that indies cannot compete on it? No, they aren't being simplistic tropes that bribe the government to outlaw all competition directly, but I would suggest to not use that as one's only measurement.
> The music labels who decide the terms of sale didn't create the music. They're rent seeking corporations who seek to increase their profits in any way possible and bribe politicians to create artificial barriers through which they can create toll gates.
This is a self-serving rationalization that is not universally true. There are plenty of labels that are artist-owned, or are very friendly to artists. These tend to be small or mid-sized labels, and have been the most hurt by piracy. Ani Difranco has spoken about the impact of piracy on her Righteous Babe Records. Fat Mike of Fat Wreck Chords has spoken about the impact of piracy on independent and growing bands.
Meanwhile the biggest labels (the ones you're complaining about) have done just fine under piracy because they've never hesitated to sign acts desperate for the big time to crappy 360 deals that give the label a cut of every single revenue stream.
Looking at "the music industry" as a whole obscures the truth, which is that the shape of the music industry has changed--the middle has been hollowed out.
What we have now is a system in which it's easier than ever to get discovered, but if you want to actually make money, you're more dependent than ever on a huge company to permit that to happen--whether it's a big label, commercial sync deals, Ticketmaster, YouTube, etc.
I don't pirate music or movies so it's not "a self-serving rationalization".
It's an argument that copyright law serves the interests of a few at the expense of the many.
And I think you've missed the point about smaller bands and labels. They struggle whether they sign with a big label or go independent because only superstars and big corporations make big money from music. Many fans know this and are generous to support their favorite smaller bands.
Yes, I totally understand. Hence why I put 'victimless crime' in inverted commas. The perception around stealing music is not the same as stealing the handbag, or a loaf of bread - that's the point.
> (Just like jumping the turnstile in the subway is not a victimless crime even if there are free seats, or sneaking into a sports stadium.)
It's not at all like jumping a turnstile or sneaking into a stadium.
There are real costs associated with servicing an in-person customer on a train or stadium. From additional security, to garbage, to air conditioning. All those might seem small but it is an additional expense on the operator of those services.
Downloading music without paying doesn't cost the music industry a dime.
I'm not saying using IP without paying is acceptable but your comparison doesn't take a proper look at the issue.
The number of consumers is higher but so is the competition for entertainment. Netflix, YouTube, etc. are more likely taking revenue than someone downloading a song without paying.
> There are real costs associated with servicing an in-person customer on a train or stadium. From additional security, to garbage, to air conditioning. All those might seem small but it is an additional expense on the operator of those services.
The marginal cost of a stow-away on a subway train or in a sports stadium is very nearly zero. Even if it isn't, there is no magical moral transition that happens as the marginal cost goes from $10 to $1 to $0.01 to $0. The reason sneaking into a sports stadium is wrong is not because it deprives the stadium owner of the $0.01 marginal cost of an additional person being present. It's because it deprives them of the opportunity to sell a ticket for $100.
> The reason sneaking into a sports stadium is wrong is not because it deprives the stadium owner of the $0.01 marginal cost of an additional person being present. It's because it deprives them of the opportunity to sell a ticket for $100.
The argument is that pirates wouldn't have bought the song, so it's not depriving the artist of any revenue. The pirate either doesn't have the song or they pirate it. Buying it is not one of their options.
The stadium owner would never see the $100 because the person couldn't afford to purchase the ticket. So, it's not lost revenue to them. However, if someone sneaks in, now you're costing the owner money.
That's why I'm saying the in-person analogy doesn't fit.
> Even if it isn't, there is no magical moral transition that happens as the marginal cost goes from $10 to $1 to $0.01 to $0.
But there sort of is. Everywhere else when a company is caught selling something for big multiples of the marginal costs, people are outraged. Think of e.g. costs of SMS in the past (which were essentially free for the providers), or how people react to ticket scalping. Even drugs, where the initial costs are high, don't get a free pass here. In most areas of the market, you have competition that ensures margins are reasonable, and outside those areas, people selling way over what they need to recoup the costs are generally considered assholes.
> The reason sneaking into a sports stadium is wrong is not because it deprives the stadium owner of the $0.01 marginal cost of an additional person being present. It's because it deprives them of the opportunity to sell a ticket for $100.
On the other hand, if a stadium was already making money hand over fist on the game, recouping their costs with a wide margin, being too bitter about a couple of people sneaking in would be considered soulless, whereas turning a blind eye would be considered noble. This is a more complex and context-dependent topic; things do not boil down to "opportunity to sell". Hell, in this particular case I'd expect most people's intuitions would be related to general property rights (not paying $100 is trespassing).
> Everywhere else when a company is caught selling something for big multiples of the marginal costs, people are outraged.
No they're not; people in the U.S. buy a heck of a lot of bottled water, despite the fact that potable water is available basically anywhere for free.
And try this: shoplift a bottle of water from a 7-11 and when the cops come, tell them that water is free anyway, and the 7-11 has a big multiple markup, so it's not really a crime. See how that goes.
> No they're not; people in the U.S. buy a heck of a lot of bottled water, despite the fact that potable water is available basically anywhere for free.
That may be the case today, but companies selling bottled water have huge marketing budgets and exploit people's lack of trust in public institutions.
> And try this: shoplift a bottle of water from a 7-11 and when the cops come, tell them that water is free anyway, and the 7-11 has a big multiple markup, so it's not really a crime. See how that goes.
I wouldn't shoplift a bottle just as I wouldn't shoplift a music CD. I wouldn't even go to the shop in the first place, as I can get both drinking water and the songs I want from near-free sources, and with better quality.
Imagine a sports stadium that is completely empty except for two teams playing the best game they ever had. And then getting paid $0 and their bosses are ready to pack it in and cancel everything. Now imaging a giant second stadium build out of wood that eclipses the industry built one that goes 45 stories taller than the first one. This one is packed with people that simply helped build that larger stadium surrounding the original and overlooks that game being played.
So.. just downvoting and not even a single comment how this doesn't apply? To me, that's simply people that want to continue the party without having to explain themselves.
Taking advantage of something someone created on terms different than what they’re willing to offer it to you is not a “victimless crime.” (Just like jumping the turnstile in the subway is not a victimless crime even if there are free seats, or sneaking into a sports stadium.) At the margin it lowers the price everyone is willing to pay for yhe item.
Let me offer the opposing perspective.
Why should a business use the State to enforce a broken scarce physical property model at odds with how information honestly disseminates (impedance mismatch or category error) just so they can prop up their own business models? If their business models can’t be profitable without enforcing draconian and perhaps misapplied rules, then their business model should not be viable and we should rely on eg open source collaboration or hobbyists. Perhaps businesses SHOULDN’T have a “right” to create really complex movies music and software if it means causing far more others harm downstream.
Humans make up systems to enforce this or that “right”, which is nothing but a guarantee from some organization (eg a state) that they will fight to coerce someone to honor some agreement, even if you didn’t make one explicitly.
I never made an agreement to NOT listen to someone’s song. With a turnstile, I can be physically prevented from entering the premises until I agree to an agreement. The turnstile can be made “unjumpable” - and many are. If I didn’t explicitly agree to anything then maybe I can jump the turnstile, in a libertarian world where we have to explicitly agree to something.
Anyway, now let’s assume we are not in an ancap utopia. So people form organizations and they figure out what system of coersion works and what doesn’t.
The system of private property requires force to enforce, just as much as other “government” things. So it may be justified for personal protection and chattel property, but as you move further away from that, it may be less justified and have less payoff. Should a person be able to own an idea, or 50000 acres of land if others can put it to good use?
And how did they come to own it? “Homesteading” the land or idea? John Locke who coined the idea also said a man shouldn’t own more land than he can cultivate himself or arrange an organization to do efficiently, or society is wasting land. And also you may have massive rent seeking and sharecropping. Like how we had now with A&R departments and actual artists before Spotify. Or — sorry fellow entrepreneurs — how Facebook Google and others exploit their infrastructure monopoly and lock-in to have access to all your data and exercise control because there are no open-source alternatives.
Is this really the best system? Is it the most moral? You appeal to morality of the individual in the system but you must first consider the benefits and legitimacy of the system itself.
> Why should a business use the State to enforce a broken scarce physical property model at odds with how information honestly disseminates (impedance mismatch or category error) just so they can prop up their own business models? If their business models can’t be profitable without enforcing draconian and perhaps misapplied rules, then their business model should not be viable and we should rely on eg open source collaboration or hobbyists. Perhaps businesses SHOULDN’T have a “right” to create really complex movies music and software if it means causing far more others harm downstream.
There is zero harm to others downstream, because the only thing those people are being deprived of is a product that wouldn't exist at all without the "evil" content creators. You're not being deprived of anything when you can't download Avengers: Infinity Wars for free. You're just prevented from having your cake and eating it too. (I.e. consuming a product that was created in express reliance on the copyright system, without paying for it.) Which is the reason we allow companies to enforce this artificial scarcity--it allows creation of a product that people want more than the alternatives.
It's precisely because this scarcity is artificial that it's moral. If people wanted to consume content from "open source collaboration or hobbyists" then they would do it. Nothing is stopping them. But people don't want the hobbyist project, they want the $200 million Hollywood blockbuster. And if that's the case, people have no right to demand access to that content on terms different from what the creator is willing to agree to.
Oh please. Are people not deprived of drug research that people around the world would do on the long tail if Big Pharma didn’t chill their activities? Is it good for the world that innovation is restricted by force to US Big Pharma?
“But if we didn’t have government, who would build the roads???”
“But if we didn’t have copyright, who would write all the software and encyclopedias?!? Oh wait...”
If you make a moral argument about a pirate in the system, prepare to get an opposing moral argument about the system itself.
How many people could have been cured of Malaria if we allowed open source drug research to flourish? In every OTHER science department eg physics people publish their ideas freely.
> At the margin [piracy] lowers the price everyone is willing to pay for the item.
Does it though? Someone jumping the turnstile in the subway doesn't make me think "man, my ticket is too expensive really".
Instead, it makes me think "that person can't afford a ticket, but the additional operating cost of the subway for a rare unpaying passenger is basically nothing, and a free trip probably means a lot to someone poor, so letting them get away with that has basically added value to the world for free".
I believe most people are honest and want to play by the book. Large-scale cheating indicates an underlying problem, like poverty or general shittiness of the only available options.
In my life I've only ever seen one person who looked like they couldn't afford to buy a ticket to pass through the exit door. All the youth I've seen jumping the turnstiles were people who clearly could. In many cases it's the same with the music, I know several people that just flat out refuse to pay for any music or films.
That is just you. I have seen enough people who, after having taken a train ride where nobody ended up checking their tickets, complain that they wasted money on a ticket. I have also seen enough people who don’t take rules seriously because “everyone else is violating them too”.
I disagree in some scenarios. If someone has no market access or cannot afford an album or song, then the record label is not losing any money because the sale wouldn't have happened. More importantly, because the cost to copy a file is virtually $0.00, the record label does not lose any money in maintenance costs (unlike a subway or sports stadium), or in replacement costs (like a purse).
"It lowers the price everyone is willing to pay for the item". Not really. This is happening because the supply of music continues to grow each year. I can't find the article, but a (I believe) French economist predicted this would happen decades ago (1980s?)
> "It lowers the price everyone is willing to pay for the item". Not really.
To some extent it does, simply because of "why should I pay ${exorbitant amount of money} if I can torrent it for free?" consideration. Which is, IMO, a fair consideration, as we're talking about goods that are infinitely reproducible for $0.00 marginal cost. The availability of piracy does cause problems for "legitimate" distributors, but this doesn't automatically imply torrents are bad and labels have the moral high ground.
The core of the problem stems from the goods being infinitely reproducible for $0.00 marginal cost. Such goods inherently don't work with the scarcity-based business models invented for physical items. Media companies are doing the world great harm by trying to brute-force this impedance mismatch by legislation and technology.
You may not be aware, but on digital, they charge less for an album than LP and compact disc. So given the decline in sales of physical media, and the rise in streaming, (which they get paid next-to-nothing for, I might add,) along with the overall increase of non-streamed digital sales, they've absolutely gotten millions of new consumers. It's just cheaper now, because physical media has huge markups.
> People treat piracy as a victimless crime because the marginal cost of each item is zero. Imagine extending similar logic to a handbag. If you steal an LV purse you can’t afford, how do you measure damages? The $1,000 marginal cost to physically replicate the purse, or the $10,000 retail price? That basic logic doesn’t change as the marginal cost goes to zero.
It absolutely does; they aren't taking it from the publisher of the music, or an outlet for music, they're having it shared with them from the second-hand market. This allows no loss on the part of the publisher (and more importantly artist), no inefficiency in having to restock an item, and doesn't involve the publisher in any way.
It's not stealing, it's copying. If you steal something on physical media, you'll be making them lose something, and they'll have to replace it. If you copy something on digital media, they don't have to spend man-hours replacing something.
> The moral rationalizations don't really hold water. It's not like the music industry is out there lobbying to prevent competing content. Their whole business model is creating content that's so desirable that they are non-fungible--people won't settle for a slightly different clone. Advances in digital technology have made it so the cost to create content is lower than ever. But people don't want just any superhero movie, want to see Wonder Woman or the Avengers: Infinity War.
There aren't live shows in the case of movies, and at those live shows the actors wouldn't be receiving the largest amount of currency for acting in them.
In the case of music?
The venue is far more generous with the split than the label is.
With music piracy, it has a very strong chance of increasing an artist's revenue from live sales, which is better for them than purchases of albums, anyway.
Also, it's worth noting that the EU ran a study on the effects of digital piracy just a few years ago; and their results were...
...that in the case of games, piracy improved sales, in the case of movies, piracy decreased sales, and in the case of everything else, piracy had no effect on sales at all.
*
And I'm saying this as a person who buys LP and digital all the time.
>> People treat piracy as a victimless crime because the marginal cost of each item is zero. Imagine extending similar logic to a handbag. If you steal an LV purse you can’t afford, how do you measure damages? The $1,000 marginal cost to physically replicate the purse, or the $10,000 retail price? That basic logic doesn’t change as the marginal cost goes to zero.
> It absolutely does...
I mostly agree with your comment, but you gave up to easily on this part. The basic logic is exactly the same—but the correct assessment of the damage in this scenario is the $1,000 marginal cost to replace the stolen purse, not the artificially inflated $10,000 retail price.
Of course, there is another, more important, difference in play besides marginal cost: the copyright holder is already "whole". Their ability to use their property has not been impacted in the slightest by the existence of additional copies. The concept of "damages" in such a scenario is completely artificial.
Comparison with physical goods is always flawed. When your marginal cost is exactly zero, then there isn't even a concept of replacement. There exists an infinite supply of the good, therefore price should be near-zero. Copyright infringement cannot reduce your supply.
If humanity could invent a magical machine that makes a direct atom-for-atom replica of any physical good at zero cost, using zero raw materials, I would expect the market price of those physical goods to drop to zero or near-zero. This is an economic rationalization, not a moral one.
Just because a single instance of the good has a near zero price, it doesn't mean the creation of the initial product cost nothing. Even though everyone in the universe could potentially consume a copy, the item still needs to be able to at least recoup its cost with the consumers that are actually going to consume it.
The ideal scenario would be a pricing structure where the early adopters and initial consumers would pay a higher price until the development costs were recouped (plus a profit margin), and after the development costs were accounted for, the price would shift to whatever the profit margin was calculated to be per product.
The cost-based pricing is inherently flawed as supply/demand typically governs prices, however digital media tends to stick to whatever tradition dictates, e.g. $60 for a game or $0.99 per song. It is hard to gauge sunk costs for performance art past what it costs to run the studio for X amount of time + whatever salary artists get paid.
>> The cost-based pricing is inherently flawed as supply/demand typically governs prices, however digital media tends to stick to whatever tradition dictates, e.g. $60 for a game or $0.99 per song. It is hard to gauge sunk costs for performance art past what it costs to run the studio for X amount of time + whatever salary artists get paid.
That's true. I find myself coming down on the side of "the creator should set the price" rather than the consumer. Digital media is weird in that it's very easy to duplicate the creators work, but as the "supply" is potentially infinite, I'd like the system to be a price/demand ratio, where the cost of the item determines whether the product is consumed, instead of the consumer circumventing the creator to consume the product without remuneration.
That's how it works for most people. If the cost of an item is too high, most people don't buy it. With digital media the effects of "theft" are largely overstated because pirates wouldn't buy the game if they had to pay for it. With traditional goods theft results in a cost to the creator due to physical materials costing money to produce, however digital goods have no such cost and thus the creator loses very little to pirates in practice.
It's hard to fathom a moral system that thinks you have a greater obligation to a monopolistic company and a multimillionaire singer than any random poor guy. According to your attitude, someone is a bad person if they don't pay for the latest Avengers film, but I doubt you would condemn someone who doesn't give to charity with the same vehemence.
>That basic logic doesn’t change as the marginal cost goes to zero.
Actually, I think it does change precisely when it reaches zero. It's only because of the marketing language of the industry that we are enticed to believe that something that can be copied billions and trillions of times at no cost is some kind of valuable finite artifact.
I'm not sure I get your point about theft. When I had some tools stolen earlier this year the cost of the damage was the replacement cost of the tools, not the price on the sticker. The (legal) replacement cost of a stolen song is about $0, which would seem to make this a victimless crime again.
I have a Spotify subscription and regularly buy albums, but what's wrong with pirating the music of musicians that are long dead? It's not like the owners of the copyright "deserve" the money in any more than a legal sense.
Exactly. I have a spotify subscription and I do buy some albums from bandcamp where I do know that a good portion of the money goes to the artist and not to some useless blood-sucking middle-man. With movies... tell me, where can I buy/stream a movie from the 90s or so that won't cost me 50$ for 2h of fun? With albums I rip them to my computer immediately and just store the CD( or buy digital). Can't do that with movies or shows.
If something isn't available for streaming, it is very likely to be available on DVD or Blu-Ray. Even if the media are region-coded, region-free players may be perfectly legal in your jurisdiction.
>...and yet music industry revenues are on the up again.
I keep seeing this mentioned, but seriously, it was only in 2015 the revenues bottomed out and started to rise again. And it is not anywhere close to its peak in the 90s in real terms, and less so in terms of % spending.
Globally, China's music industry make less than $100M a year. That second largest economy in the world, and its Music revenue is less than half of Thailand.
The industry has changed, and in the west Musicians made much more money in their live performance, K-Pops have all their songs on youtube for free. Chinese Pop stars get much more from advertisement deals and other media. Japanese still loves CDs. A lot of people have grown up to consume music which is totally free.
Revenue didn't bottom out. CD revenue is still on the decline, and digital revenue is still on the decline.
Ever since the age of the first recording, music has worked on a freemium model. Music was free to listen to via the radio (and ad-supported), which acted as an advertisement and upsell for physical (and later digital) media sales.
With the decline of radio and physical media, as well as the democratization of distribution (less hits, revenue spread more evenly), the music industry has been searching for a replacement business model that works.
It looks like they've found it in streaming services.
You basically have a major label monopoly over music for most people. The power of the labels has increased with streaming. Streaming favors a tiny collection of already famous artists. What is utterly broken is the system that gave us the insanely great talents like Zappa and Hendrix. Hip hop music has transformed into professional social media trolling. Even artists like Moby are downsizing and selling off their hardware.
You have a tiny set of artists like Kanye who effectively own the industry and for the indies its like a $5 a year side income but they spend most of their spare time on it out of pure passion.
Is that considered piracy? YouTube quality is fine for most people (i.e. they either don't care, or don't have gear that's good enough to really hear the difference).
Or pick none at all, because they should sort their exclusivity problems, meanwhile piracy proves a better service. And also, pay the artist so they get onto the platform, because mine (JJGoldman, quite big in France) doesn’t like online platforms because they don’t pay enough.
Nothing more annoying than false supply limitations on content by service, exclusives, country, various availability windows.
This is the digital age, we have little time for entertainment and need our content on demand. I should be able pay and get what I want to listen to or watch without a false supply constraint to create manipulated demand.
I get why the content owners do it this way, content is king, it is just majorly annoying.
When movies are available on content services I end up not being into the movie at that time, then when I want to watch it the movie is only for purchase. So even with 4 streaming services I end up buying on iTunes or other.
For music, Spotify is doing a pretty good job of having almost everything, but still there are albums that you have to go buy or get.
The friction is so much less when pirating, just go get what you want, I'd pay for a service I could just get anything anytime with no restrictions, so I end up buying lots of movies especially.
Usability and access still favors pirating in many cases which isn't wise for the content industry.
I absolutely used to pirate all my music. Then Spotify came along.
Pandora first, but I can't remember if I had completely stopped using mp3 at that point. I maybe had an iPod full of music I didn't pay for. Can't really remember the timelines here.
Either way, just like with movie and TV, I'll happily pay for streaming if the selection is there.
“Your typical architecture astronaut will take a fact like “Napster is a peer-to-peer service for downloading music” and ignore everything but the architecture, thinking it’s interesting because it’s peer to peer, completely missing the point that it’s interesting because you can type the name of a song and listen to it right away.
...
“Talk about missing the point. If Napster wasn’t peer-to-peer but it did let you type the name of a song and then listen to it, it would have been just as popular.”
—Joel Spolsky, “Don’t Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You,” 2001
In the last 17 years, that quote keeps popping up because the companies that focus on letting you type the name of a song and listen to it right away have made money, while those that introduce friction to support some label’s business model? Not so much.
But they keep complaining about “piracy.” 90% of piracy is eliminating friction.
This past weekend, I bought the new Doctor Who on iTunes. I paid because Apple gave me a lot of ways to type the name of the show and watch it right away. Same reason I’ve spent thousands on music with them.
It’s not about the price, it’s about the convenience.
It is also about price though. I'd "rent" a lot more movies online if the price were the same as when I rented them on DVD, like fifty cents per day. However it costs like four Euros to stream a movie from Prime Video.
> Either way, just like with movie and TV, I'll happily pay for streaming if the selection is there.
Which is why I don't. No King Crimson, no cool small alternative bands, and no good way to find out of the bands you like are on spotify before getting a subscription. Furthermore: the service pays fuck all to artists. I may as well use the money to go to their concerts and buy merch directly from the artists.
There is a semi-decent selection on Spotify. I pay for the subscription and then also go to Bandcamp to buy obscure artists. I don't buy big label stuff anymore.
i'd be wary of anything the IFPI, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry present as fact.
Similar organisations were until recently engaged in shakedowns of small businesses for even playing the radio.
Even after this was ruled illegal in Europe we used to still get a letter every year demanding we pay up for the benefits music was bringing our business.
Right now I'm spending a week at Taizé, a retreat centre in France. There's access to Internet only from 9:30 am - 8 pm, for 15 minutes at a time, then a forced 10 minute break (unless I change MAC address).
I don't have a bank account here, so I can't pay for a 2 year subscription for 4G. I also don't have a job. I'm grateful for my offline music collection keeping me alive right now. Music is especially important when times are tough, and it's in those difficult times that money and subscription-level stability are hard to find.
Streaming services are nice, but I haven't yet found one that contains the complete discography that is available through torrents and other means. What's worse, what's available changes often so songs that are available now may not be available next week. In other words, streaming services provide a service, but they are far from replacing other means. If a service popped up that provided streaming of all the music I wanted to listen to 100% of the time, then it might be worth paying for. Another use case is mixing songs which usually requires local copies. Basically, all streaming services are deficient in some way so it shouldn't be any surprise that piracy continues.
Yeah - I can't easily buy losless recordings that I'd get as files that could reside on my NAS, so tough luck. Streaming services offer less than a third of what I listen to, and their UX is idiotic. I cancelled my Spotify after I found out that my downloaded songs are deleted from my phone for the fourth time for some unknown reason, that really pisses you off on a 10-hour road trip.
>Stream-ripping users are more likely to say that they rip music so they have music to listen to offline. This means they can avoid paying for a premium streaming subscription,
This doesn't make sense. A premium subscription service doesn't give you access offline, and usually won't help with cellular data caps.
From the pdf at the end of the article, this estimate is based on a study of 19000 consumers from Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, UK, US. The population of all these countries is 1.5 billion, but there are more than 3 billion internet users. Also, a study based on 0.000001 of the 1.5 billion population?
There are two things in this world that I have no problem with anyone in need stealing - food and music. I will politely look away. When I was a kid I pirated music, as well as music production software. I grew up pretty poor and I wouldn't have had those things otherwise (the only reason we had a computer was because of oil dividends given to all Alaskan residents once per year). I don't feel like anyone really lost out because of me downloading those things when I was young. But I know that the music industry eventually gained a lifetime subscriber (currently Apple Music, for many years now - family plan), and don't even get me started on the money I drop on software synthesizers. The good fortune that drizzled on me as a kid came back to those people as a raging storm. Advertisers know exactly what they need to show me when they want more of my money (those sweet, shiny synths), and I'm not even mad at them. They're almost like books now, where I don't even need to use them, I just like having them and knowing they're mine. That being said, as a long time amateur electronic musician, I'd love for people to pirate my music. As it stands I can't seem to even pay them to take it (with music that is).
Stealing is the wrong word for digital music. Copying. It's just copying. And, in most cases, it's at an immeasurable cost to anyone. To use the terms "pirating" and "stealing" not only make it seem much worse than it actually is, it waters down the mental image of legitimate use of those words, making the actual acts seem less serious. "Copycats" would be a fairer term.
Money is imaginary too - taking a piece of paper isn't really stealing? This whole pedantic argument has been used to rationalize stiffing artists for their work for decades, and its tiresome.
Edit: Actually, now that I think about it, you might have to steal it to make the copy. Your analogy is useless for this argument. Money might be an abstract concept but bills and coins aren't imaginary. Try an analogy with digital currency then maybe there be something to talk about, but I'm guessing anything you can come up with will actually be talking about "hacking" or "fraud", not "stealing".
Your argument would have more power if music weren't freely available on the radio. And if someone else paid for the music and played it, I can listen to it for "free" as well.
Musicians are stiffed by the record labels, not by the fans. The fans are the ones that keep them rich, keep them popular, buy their shirts and go to their $200/seat concerts. At worst, their records are loss-leaders for an even more lucrative business.
> Your argument would have more power if music weren't freely available on the radio.
It used to be common practice for governments to tax owners of radios (and TV sets later on). So music certainly hasn't always been freely available on the radio.
That being said, if you're sending EM waves through my property, why the hell shouldn't I be allowed tp copy them?
Stealing is the right word. You can spin it any way you like, but taking something that's for sale, without paying for it, is the definition of stealing.
To further my point: not every artist is a mega-millionaire. There are countless small bands/artists where every sale counts towards them actually earning a living off of music.
> Stealing is the right word. You can spin it any way you like, but taking something that's for sale, without paying for it, is the definition of stealing.
it's hardly as clear cut as you are making it. if I have an apple and you take it, I no longer have the apple. if I have five apples and you take one, I have four left. it's hard to imagine you taking something from me that I will still possess afterwards in the same quantity. I would argue that the sense in which most people use "take" does not include copying.
to further my point: the law in the US, a bastion of copyright enforcement, clearly recognizes the difference between theft (a criminal offense) and copyright infringement (a civil offense). you can't go to jail for piracy.
I understand your point. But, I don't think that just because something like a digital album lacks the physical properties of an apple, it's not a product worth revenue.
Presumably infinite quantities of a something like an album shouldn't suggest that it's worthless. Resources have been invested into it's creation. Artists should be able to recoup some of their investment with album sales.
If it's okay to "copy" music, than the same argument can be made for every other digital product. Games, films, and essentially all software.
to be clear, my point is that it isn't "stealing". i'm not necessarily saying it isn't wrong.
when i was teenager / college student i never thought piracy was wrong, mainly because of the "well i wouldn't have paid for it anyway" argument. now that i'm a software dev, i have plenty of money for music and movies and i realize that my own livelihood depends on IP protection. i can't justify it so easily anymore.
Insofar as it involves "somebody using something in a manner not explicitly permitted by the owner, but in a way that also does not prevent the owner from also using it," I've always thought the unauthorized use of copyrighted material was closer to trespassing than to stealing.
Like trespassing, the legal definition of piracy (in the context of intellectual property) covers a wide range of activities, from the benign to the outrageous.
Correlation does not imply causation. It seems unlikely the music itself is driving people to hijack ships, kidnap, rape and murder on such a large scale. Maybe there's something in the water.
Are you thinking that "pirate" is a dysphemism dreamed up by industry propagandists? The first software pirates named themselves that. The industry would rather call them "thieves" or "criminals," something with less of a quaint, romantic feel in the modern day.
Somehow I don't like the "rental model" for songs and books that one may enjoy multiple times in one's life (compared to movies that are usually more ephemeral, and there may not be many that one would want to watch multiple times). So "owning" — the rights to copy and play the music anywhere, anytime and on any device — seems like a better choice than supporting streaming services where you can't really say if you'd be able to listen to your favorite song tomorrow.
I feel similar for music I actually care about. That said, I'm coming from a place where I already had a large collection of music ripped from CDs I bought (plus from the early days of Napster mostly to replace music I had on vinyl). And TBH I mostly don't care that much about new music.
I still buy some music even though I subscribe to Apple Music.
But if I were coming from a place where I was starting out and owned no music, I might think differently.
Yup. Getting a Spotify account and then Netflix account made me forget the desire to pirate. Fast forward a couple years, my favourite songs and movies disappearing from those services made me seriously reconsider the value proposition, compared to visiting a well known Bay of buccaneers.
Personally, I pirate unless I can buy the music directly from the artist and download it in a lossless, DRM free format, using only open source software (or websites like Bandcamp). Maybe about 10% of my collection is paid for.
These are simple terms that serve to preserve the music. It serves the interests of a third party, not the musician or consumer, if these terms are not met.
I think you should talk to the artists before pirating their music and see what they think. Just deciding for yourself when it's OK has nothing to do with respect.
I think it serves the artist if you buy the music, however you buy it, and it doesn’t serve the artist if you pirate it.
Apply your logic to any other purchase and it falls on it feet. Do you only buy food direct from farmers? Clothes from factories? Do you only use supermarkets that use open source payment kiosks?
I don't see any stats showing a trend over time. This YouGov report indicates piracy is actually dropping in one country over the past 5 years (from 18% of Britons to 10% of Britons).
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 163 ms ] threadI used Limewire back in the day. I couldn't tell you how many songs in my collection were artist credit "System of a Down." I think I had a System of a Down copy of the 1812 Overture in there somewhere.
(It is also possible that legit channels are over-counted in the data because they're easier to explicitly audit. If the error factor estimate is the same for legit and bootleg channels, the data will reach the wrong conclusions).
Why is it not possible to buy mp3s? Amazon, play store, iTunes etc. all use no DRM to my knowledge? Or is it just a question of price?
“Piracy” includes grey market media.
Because movie studios, music labels etc. sell exclusive distribution rights to local music cartels, and many of these deals are historical and hard to get out of, e.g. maybe they were 20-30 year contracts made in the mid-90s when nobody was serious about this "Internet" thing.
Which is why Netflix has such a fragmented offering per-country, and why e.g. you might be able to technically buy some song on a CD in India, but it's not available anywhere online, or in the likes of Spotify.
You're on a long walk, absolutely starving and there's a strong possibility you won't get to eat for a while. A guy by the road is selling apples - with the small amount of cash you have on you, you could afford 4 or 5, enough to fill you up. Across the road there's an empty looking house set far back from the road, with an apple tree right in the yard at the front. Hundreds of apples have fallen on the ground - it's no biggie to lean over the fence and grab a handful of apples. No one is in the house, the guy selling apples isn't watching, what do you do?
Of course, you _are_ starving, and you do have some money, which you'd be prepared to spend on food. Now assume that next to the apple seller is a small cafe - the menu is vast and you can eat as much as you want of pretty much any kind of food. You pay once and if you stop in on the way back you can eat again. Now what do you do?
I'm guessing this has to do with labels and their distribution rights.
I was going to ask the same thing - specifically about Amazon, which sells non-DRM, standard mp3s - but it occurs to me this might only be in the United States.
What does mp3 purchasing from Amazon look like from other countries ? Just a vastly different catalog ? The same catalog but with DRM files ?
Speaking from a UK perspective, everything I've purchased from Amazon UK has been provided as DRM-free MP3. Amazon UK (and possibly elsewhere) has an AutoRip feature where CD purchases are also added as gratis downloads. This extends to prior purchases, too – I was a bit wary about downloading some items since they were bought as gifts for people via their wishlist…and yet since I was the purchaser, I was the presumed licence holder…but didn't have the CD in my possession. The same goes for CDs that I'd bought, listened to and subsequently sold, which presumably transfers the licence to the new holder of the CD…and yet I can still download the album via Amazon Music. Tricky.
For Finland and most other countries, it is not possible to purchase digital music (or movies/shows, for that matter) from Amazon.
If I try to purchase an MP3 from the US site (amazon.com), I get "We were unable to process your order with the current payment information. Please click 'Continue' to select a default payment method and 1-Click address."
Clicking "Continue" just gets me back to the item page, so even the error messaging is broken. OTOH Amazon Video has a proper error message about needing a US payment method.
Amazon does offer the Amazon Music Unlimited subscription service here, though, and I believe it has a catalog comparable to other services (but I'm not a user).
By non-Bollywood, do you mean music in other Indian languages or popular English music? Amazon Prime and Apple Music seem to have something in other languages, though nobody seems to have everything (without ads and a bad experience). Amazon Prime (with video, music and books) is Rs.999 a year, while Apple Music is Rs.120 a month.
For those not familiar with India, there are 22 official languages (you can see them on the currency notes) and about a 1000 dialects. Popular music is still mostly from movies, and the country produces more than a 1000 movies a year across different languages.
Compared to that, Bandcamp is heaven. A tiny one though I'm happy to pay for.
Western music mostly. I took a gaana.com subscription to find that its rock/metal music catalogue had big holes in it. And as you said even for bollywood music the experience is not that good.
Do you guys have devices like that in India?
Public domain should be the rule and copyright the exception.
This is already the case for most of the music that many people are interested in (e.g., Bach, Vivaldi).
And you can very easily find them. Most moderately well-known compositions have been transcribed into pdf using modern typography (say, with lilypond) and uploaded to imslp and similar sites.
[1] https://imslp.org/wiki/Brandenburg_Concerto_No.5_in_D_major,...
Personally I am interested in the notes, so I'll point out that most of the sheet music for Bach and Vivaldi is in fact under copyright. If you want something out of copyright then you have to get a facsimile of an old edition. Or something that was typeset by an amateur, which will almost certainly be crap because typesetting music takes a lot of skill to do well.
John Ruskin: 'The labour of two days is that for which you ask two hundred guineas?'
Whistler: 'No. I ask it for the knowledge I have gained in the work of a lifetime.'
You would be ok with your employer using the same argument when they paid you ?
Why? In what other area does the public automaticallt get a right to something someone else created?
If you make a chair and I buy it from you, I can do whatever I want with that chair.
Before 1989, copyright was also opt-in. Check out the timeline under "Notable Dates in United States Copyright" https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1a.html It's a mess of shifting categories and retroactive extensions.
The content that we create does not exist in a vacuum- humans create for the overall good of society. Everything you see and use day-to-day is an incredible amalgamation of thoughts and ideas woven together from centuries of our past and present collective knowledge.
The notion that an individual or organization can maintain exclusive control of "intellectual property" in perpetuity stands at odds with thousands of years of human history. Modern patent and copyright law seems to have forgotten this.
For instance Spotify is not available in many countries including Ukraine and India. The latter having a population of 1.3 billion people. GPM and Apple Music are better in that regard but nevertheless.
That being said, I also like owning my music. As files. On my own devices. Running "fair trade" operating systems that let me do that.
You surely could. Go to a store and buy a Spotify gift card with cash.
I personally live in Germany, in the middle of my live, with kids and a big household etc. and have never used a credit card, nor have I undergone a single situation where I needed one.
If you create something that can be copied endlessly at near-zero cost, and you don't want others enjoying it "for free", then you need to charge an appropriate price for the initial publication. You have every right to keep it to yourself, and to charge whatever price you deem fair in exchange for the service of revealing it to others, but once you've done that it's rightfully out of your hands.
For example this game I picked at random goes from $19 in USA to as low as $6 in Argentina: https://steamdb.info/app/440900/
Is this absolutely crazy? Yes.
Only in some legal systems. E.g. in some countries you can make a backup copy of a software you bought.
I believe eventually this will happened, and you wont be able to market or even program a non-cloud monitored player.
This will be accompanied by ratcheting up of subscription cost.
This dystopian situation was exactly predicted by rms more than 20 years ago [1].
[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
If you can't get something legally - because you actually can't, or because you can't afford it, it's a 'victimless crime' and you desperately want it - you'll pirate it. But I think most people are happy to pay for the convenience of everything. £10 a month for Spotify is a no brainer for me. The problem happens when (label?) greed sinks in again and the streaming services fragment with 'exclusives' on each. At that point, people end up picking one to spend their cash on, and they'll pirate or stream a shitty version on YouTube the songs they can't get on their streaming service.
You want to get more people to pay? Licence everything to everything - then the only people that will pirate are the ones that would never pay anyway. And I bet they're a smaller subset than four in ten.
Fragmentation is a huge problem, and I don’t understand it. Why do you care about managing your own streaming platform. Just licens everything at a price you believe to be fair and let the platforms fight to provide the best experience. As a music, TV or movie studio you’re the only one that sure to make money.
This would be amazing. Imagine picking your streaming service based on who has the best app / recommendations / social baked in (or whatever you were looking for). But from a friend that works in TV sales - the platforms fight and pay for the exclusives. If it's going to everyone - pass. That money helps film the new stuff. I guess music has an advantage in the respect that it doesn't really work like that - and it's much cheaper to record an album. That's why it's so frustrating when music services fragment.
It's pretty rare that I can find something on Spotify that isn't on Google yet (or vice versa), and even then they usually catch up to each other eventually.
because voluntarily giving up control over your content to a monopole means you loose leverage. If 90% of all video content is on netflix, they can set the terms, not you. "we're paying half of that or we dont host it".
> Just licens everything at a price you believe to be fair
They most likely do. But if noone else is willing to pay enough, its only going to be on their own platform.
if your content has a price in the open, streaming platforms can then compete on price/quality to end user. instead, today, they compete 100% on exclusives.
> streaming platforms can then compete
It seems fragmentation is part of your premise rather than something you're disagreeing about.
The post your replied to explained why there's fragmentation: one winner takes it all if you let it.
Distribution of content is a "near-zero" cost relative to content production. However, the value of content distribution value is much higher than content. Furthermore, the value of the distribution of the content rises exponentially based on the collective set of content.
It's basically designed as a winner-take-all environment, so you have a bunch of digital fiefdoms. Or as put by Jim Barksdale on How to Make Money: "you either bundle or unbundle".
The producers are merging with content providers precisely because it allows for this maximization of revenue. It's no accident. Apple ruined it by taking 30% of most digital activity on the planet - that's where the money is at scale and you won't see a reversal until those margins start to approach zero.
If a content producer wants the most amount of profit for a known good, say a famous band, (meaning they don't need to give it away to get discovered) then you'll make sure to fragment your customers and make the people that want it most "pay" the most. It makes all kinds of sense as a producer, and it happens in every industry.
Piracy is consumers saying "this is BS" and stealing the content so they don't have to pay more - because they feel entitled to do so. Sure, "let everything be free" is a wonderful goal culturally and for consumers but the model won't win out for things in extremely high demand.
They are the two sides of the same coin, which is that people don't want to pay what the content providers want to charge. Fragmentation wouldn't be a problem if each service was 99 cents a month, and bundling wouldn't be a problem if one big service that had everything charged $10 a month. Netflix showed that the latter is true - people generally don't complain about having to pay for all the content they don't care about on Netflix because they feel that what they do watch is worth at least $10/month.
As to music industry revenues--they're basically flat over the last 20 years: https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=9McmTl.... Which is crazy, because the number of new consumers that can afford their product is through the roof.
People treat piracy as a victimless crime because the marginal cost of each item is zero. Imagine extending similar logic to a handbag. If you steal an LV purse you can’t afford, how do you measure damages? The $1,000 marginal cost to physically replicate the purse, or the $10,000 retail price? That basic logic doesn’t change as the marginal cost goes to zero.
The moral rationalizations don't really hold water. It's not like the music industry is out there lobbying to prevent competing content. Their whole business model is creating content that's so desirable that they are non-fungible--people won't settle for a slightly different clone. Advances in digital technology have made it so the cost to create content is lower than ever. But people don't want just any superhero movie, want to see Wonder Woman or the Avengers: Infinity War.
And their control is expanding. Older works that should (by historical precedent) be part of the commons remain copyrighted because of endless extensions. Practices that were once legal and common become illegal (like copying tapes vs copying CDs) or technically difficult (like recording music off the radio vs recording music off the Internet).
Fighting back and "lowering the price everyone is willing to pay" doesn't sound like a bad thing to me.
I respect your right to your opinion that poor people should be prevented from hearing or seeing something entertaining because a corporation wants more money (it's rarely the creator who makes these decisions), but that's not the only legitimate opinion.
Copyright isn't a law handed down by God; it's a fairly new legal creation on the scale of human history and its constant expansion is a major factor behind increasing inequality in the world.
In fact, most of the world still doesn't believe it, which is why the US has to fight so hard to expand copyright and patent protection in other nations.
Yes, copyright is an artificial barrier, but a barrier to what? It's not a barrier to fair competition. It's a barrier to circumventing a creators right to bargain about the price of her creation.
Copyright itself isn't "handed down by God," but the idea that people should own the fruits of their own labor is an old one. That's all copyright is.
The origin of copyright was providing monopoly rights to the Stationers Guild in Britain to control printing of works under the Licensing of the Press Act 1662. So a right vested in the printers who wanted to be able to sell for much higher prices than the duplication itself justified, not the authors.
Of course this would also allow them to pay more to authors, because they would be able to amortise it over more copies, but the guild had a monopoly on printing, so it was not in any of their interests to substantially increase the proportion paid to authors - the main benefit of this monopoly was to themselves.
When parliament refused to renew it after protests because of the censorship it authorised, the Stationers Guild kept trying to push for it to be reintroduced, and first then started pushing the "authors rights" angle, leading to the Statue of Anne (Copyright Act 1710), which was the first "modern" copyright act in that it vested rights in authors.
But the idea of restricting the ability to copy to favour the creators of a work was something the printers first started pushing for their own interest because their abuse of the copyrights previously granted to them directly made it unpalatable to re-authorise those rights.
If copyright law wasn't serving the interests of Disney, Sony, and other big corporations, they'd be pressuring politicians to change it, rather than expand it to other countries.
What determines legitimate? There is, of course, the law. But the law has numerous limits and abilities to be exploited. To some extent, the law of the past was violated by the RIAA and others, and so nothing they do could be considered legitimate. And on a very different line of reasoning, the law can be considered only a tax and thus it is legitimate to pay the tax once enforced.
>The music industry isn't "brib[ing] politicians" to "create artificial barriers" to people creating competing content.
They don't lobby for laws that do things such as lead to YouTube creating copyright systems they can then exploit to take out competitors? Using government to capture the EM spectrum so that indies cannot compete on it? No, they aren't being simplistic tropes that bribe the government to outlaw all competition directly, but I would suggest to not use that as one's only measurement.
This is a self-serving rationalization that is not universally true. There are plenty of labels that are artist-owned, or are very friendly to artists. These tend to be small or mid-sized labels, and have been the most hurt by piracy. Ani Difranco has spoken about the impact of piracy on her Righteous Babe Records. Fat Mike of Fat Wreck Chords has spoken about the impact of piracy on independent and growing bands.
Meanwhile the biggest labels (the ones you're complaining about) have done just fine under piracy because they've never hesitated to sign acts desperate for the big time to crappy 360 deals that give the label a cut of every single revenue stream.
Looking at "the music industry" as a whole obscures the truth, which is that the shape of the music industry has changed--the middle has been hollowed out.
What we have now is a system in which it's easier than ever to get discovered, but if you want to actually make money, you're more dependent than ever on a huge company to permit that to happen--whether it's a big label, commercial sync deals, Ticketmaster, YouTube, etc.
It's an argument that copyright law serves the interests of a few at the expense of the many.
And I think you've missed the point about smaller bands and labels. They struggle whether they sign with a big label or go independent because only superstars and big corporations make big money from music. Many fans know this and are generous to support their favorite smaller bands.
> (Just like jumping the turnstile in the subway is not a victimless crime even if there are free seats, or sneaking into a sports stadium.)
It's not at all like jumping a turnstile or sneaking into a stadium.
There are real costs associated with servicing an in-person customer on a train or stadium. From additional security, to garbage, to air conditioning. All those might seem small but it is an additional expense on the operator of those services.
Downloading music without paying doesn't cost the music industry a dime.
I'm not saying using IP without paying is acceptable but your comparison doesn't take a proper look at the issue.
Further...
> As to music industry revenues--they're basically flat over the last 20 years: https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=9McmTl.... Which is crazy, because the number of new consumers that can afford their product is through the roof.
The number of consumers is higher but so is the competition for entertainment. Netflix, YouTube, etc. are more likely taking revenue than someone downloading a song without paying.
The marginal cost of a stow-away on a subway train or in a sports stadium is very nearly zero. Even if it isn't, there is no magical moral transition that happens as the marginal cost goes from $10 to $1 to $0.01 to $0. The reason sneaking into a sports stadium is wrong is not because it deprives the stadium owner of the $0.01 marginal cost of an additional person being present. It's because it deprives them of the opportunity to sell a ticket for $100.
The argument is that pirates wouldn't have bought the song, so it's not depriving the artist of any revenue. The pirate either doesn't have the song or they pirate it. Buying it is not one of their options.
The stadium owner would never see the $100 because the person couldn't afford to purchase the ticket. So, it's not lost revenue to them. However, if someone sneaks in, now you're costing the owner money.
That's why I'm saying the in-person analogy doesn't fit.
But there sort of is. Everywhere else when a company is caught selling something for big multiples of the marginal costs, people are outraged. Think of e.g. costs of SMS in the past (which were essentially free for the providers), or how people react to ticket scalping. Even drugs, where the initial costs are high, don't get a free pass here. In most areas of the market, you have competition that ensures margins are reasonable, and outside those areas, people selling way over what they need to recoup the costs are generally considered assholes.
> The reason sneaking into a sports stadium is wrong is not because it deprives the stadium owner of the $0.01 marginal cost of an additional person being present. It's because it deprives them of the opportunity to sell a ticket for $100.
On the other hand, if a stadium was already making money hand over fist on the game, recouping their costs with a wide margin, being too bitter about a couple of people sneaking in would be considered soulless, whereas turning a blind eye would be considered noble. This is a more complex and context-dependent topic; things do not boil down to "opportunity to sell". Hell, in this particular case I'd expect most people's intuitions would be related to general property rights (not paying $100 is trespassing).
No they're not; people in the U.S. buy a heck of a lot of bottled water, despite the fact that potable water is available basically anywhere for free.
And try this: shoplift a bottle of water from a 7-11 and when the cops come, tell them that water is free anyway, and the 7-11 has a big multiple markup, so it's not really a crime. See how that goes.
That may be the case today, but companies selling bottled water have huge marketing budgets and exploit people's lack of trust in public institutions.
> And try this: shoplift a bottle of water from a 7-11 and when the cops come, tell them that water is free anyway, and the 7-11 has a big multiple markup, so it's not really a crime. See how that goes.
I wouldn't shoplift a bottle just as I wouldn't shoplift a music CD. I wouldn't even go to the shop in the first place, as I can get both drinking water and the songs I want from near-free sources, and with better quality.
So.. just downvoting and not even a single comment how this doesn't apply? To me, that's simply people that want to continue the party without having to explain themselves.
Let me offer the opposing perspective.
Why should a business use the State to enforce a broken scarce physical property model at odds with how information honestly disseminates (impedance mismatch or category error) just so they can prop up their own business models? If their business models can’t be profitable without enforcing draconian and perhaps misapplied rules, then their business model should not be viable and we should rely on eg open source collaboration or hobbyists. Perhaps businesses SHOULDN’T have a “right” to create really complex movies music and software if it means causing far more others harm downstream.
Humans make up systems to enforce this or that “right”, which is nothing but a guarantee from some organization (eg a state) that they will fight to coerce someone to honor some agreement, even if you didn’t make one explicitly.
I never made an agreement to NOT listen to someone’s song. With a turnstile, I can be physically prevented from entering the premises until I agree to an agreement. The turnstile can be made “unjumpable” - and many are. If I didn’t explicitly agree to anything then maybe I can jump the turnstile, in a libertarian world where we have to explicitly agree to something.
Anyway, now let’s assume we are not in an ancap utopia. So people form organizations and they figure out what system of coersion works and what doesn’t.
The system of private property requires force to enforce, just as much as other “government” things. So it may be justified for personal protection and chattel property, but as you move further away from that, it may be less justified and have less payoff. Should a person be able to own an idea, or 50000 acres of land if others can put it to good use?
And how did they come to own it? “Homesteading” the land or idea? John Locke who coined the idea also said a man shouldn’t own more land than he can cultivate himself or arrange an organization to do efficiently, or society is wasting land. And also you may have massive rent seeking and sharecropping. Like how we had now with A&R departments and actual artists before Spotify. Or — sorry fellow entrepreneurs — how Facebook Google and others exploit their infrastructure monopoly and lock-in to have access to all your data and exercise control because there are no open-source alternatives.
Is this really the best system? Is it the most moral? You appeal to morality of the individual in the system but you must first consider the benefits and legitimacy of the system itself.
There is zero harm to others downstream, because the only thing those people are being deprived of is a product that wouldn't exist at all without the "evil" content creators. You're not being deprived of anything when you can't download Avengers: Infinity Wars for free. You're just prevented from having your cake and eating it too. (I.e. consuming a product that was created in express reliance on the copyright system, without paying for it.) Which is the reason we allow companies to enforce this artificial scarcity--it allows creation of a product that people want more than the alternatives.
It's precisely because this scarcity is artificial that it's moral. If people wanted to consume content from "open source collaboration or hobbyists" then they would do it. Nothing is stopping them. But people don't want the hobbyist project, they want the $200 million Hollywood blockbuster. And if that's the case, people have no right to demand access to that content on terms different from what the creator is willing to agree to.
That seems quite silly. Obviously you're being deprived of watching Avengers: Infinity War.
“But if we didn’t have government, who would build the roads???”
“But if we didn’t have copyright, who would write all the software and encyclopedias?!? Oh wait...”
If you make a moral argument about a pirate in the system, prepare to get an opposing moral argument about the system itself.
How many people could have been cured of Malaria if we allowed open source drug research to flourish? In every OTHER science department eg physics people publish their ideas freely.
But how is that possible without patents???
Does it though? Someone jumping the turnstile in the subway doesn't make me think "man, my ticket is too expensive really".
Instead, it makes me think "that person can't afford a ticket, but the additional operating cost of the subway for a rare unpaying passenger is basically nothing, and a free trip probably means a lot to someone poor, so letting them get away with that has basically added value to the world for free".
I believe most people are honest and want to play by the book. Large-scale cheating indicates an underlying problem, like poverty or general shittiness of the only available options.
"It lowers the price everyone is willing to pay for the item". Not really. This is happening because the supply of music continues to grow each year. I can't find the article, but a (I believe) French economist predicted this would happen decades ago (1980s?)
To some extent it does, simply because of "why should I pay ${exorbitant amount of money} if I can torrent it for free?" consideration. Which is, IMO, a fair consideration, as we're talking about goods that are infinitely reproducible for $0.00 marginal cost. The availability of piracy does cause problems for "legitimate" distributors, but this doesn't automatically imply torrents are bad and labels have the moral high ground.
The core of the problem stems from the goods being infinitely reproducible for $0.00 marginal cost. Such goods inherently don't work with the scarcity-based business models invented for physical items. Media companies are doing the world great harm by trying to brute-force this impedance mismatch by legislation and technology.
https://www.billboard.com/files/media/01-GMR-graph-billboard...
You may not be aware, but on digital, they charge less for an album than LP and compact disc. So given the decline in sales of physical media, and the rise in streaming, (which they get paid next-to-nothing for, I might add,) along with the overall increase of non-streamed digital sales, they've absolutely gotten millions of new consumers. It's just cheaper now, because physical media has huge markups.
> People treat piracy as a victimless crime because the marginal cost of each item is zero. Imagine extending similar logic to a handbag. If you steal an LV purse you can’t afford, how do you measure damages? The $1,000 marginal cost to physically replicate the purse, or the $10,000 retail price? That basic logic doesn’t change as the marginal cost goes to zero.
It absolutely does; they aren't taking it from the publisher of the music, or an outlet for music, they're having it shared with them from the second-hand market. This allows no loss on the part of the publisher (and more importantly artist), no inefficiency in having to restock an item, and doesn't involve the publisher in any way.
It's not stealing, it's copying. If you steal something on physical media, you'll be making them lose something, and they'll have to replace it. If you copy something on digital media, they don't have to spend man-hours replacing something.
> The moral rationalizations don't really hold water. It's not like the music industry is out there lobbying to prevent competing content. Their whole business model is creating content that's so desirable that they are non-fungible--people won't settle for a slightly different clone. Advances in digital technology have made it so the cost to create content is lower than ever. But people don't want just any superhero movie, want to see Wonder Woman or the Avengers: Infinity War.
There aren't live shows in the case of movies, and at those live shows the actors wouldn't be receiving the largest amount of currency for acting in them.
In the case of music?
The venue is far more generous with the split than the label is.
With music piracy, it has a very strong chance of increasing an artist's revenue from live sales, which is better for them than purchases of albums, anyway.
Also, it's worth noting that the EU ran a study on the effects of digital piracy just a few years ago; and their results were...
https://gizmodo.com/the-eu-suppressed-a-300-page-study-that-...
...that in the case of games, piracy improved sales, in the case of movies, piracy decreased sales, and in the case of everything else, piracy had no effect on sales at all.
*
And I'm saying this as a person who buys LP and digital all the time.
> It absolutely does...
I mostly agree with your comment, but you gave up to easily on this part. The basic logic is exactly the same—but the correct assessment of the damage in this scenario is the $1,000 marginal cost to replace the stolen purse, not the artificially inflated $10,000 retail price.
Of course, there is another, more important, difference in play besides marginal cost: the copyright holder is already "whole". Their ability to use their property has not been impacted in the slightest by the existence of additional copies. The concept of "damages" in such a scenario is completely artificial.
If humanity could invent a magical machine that makes a direct atom-for-atom replica of any physical good at zero cost, using zero raw materials, I would expect the market price of those physical goods to drop to zero or near-zero. This is an economic rationalization, not a moral one.
The cost-based pricing is inherently flawed as supply/demand typically governs prices, however digital media tends to stick to whatever tradition dictates, e.g. $60 for a game or $0.99 per song. It is hard to gauge sunk costs for performance art past what it costs to run the studio for X amount of time + whatever salary artists get paid.
That's true. I find myself coming down on the side of "the creator should set the price" rather than the consumer. Digital media is weird in that it's very easy to duplicate the creators work, but as the "supply" is potentially infinite, I'd like the system to be a price/demand ratio, where the cost of the item determines whether the product is consumed, instead of the consumer circumventing the creator to consume the product without remuneration.
Actually, I think it does change precisely when it reaches zero. It's only because of the marketing language of the industry that we are enticed to believe that something that can be copied billions and trillions of times at no cost is some kind of valuable finite artifact.
They are really an old-school industry that needs to die,and be replaced with independent musicians that release songs on YouTube.
"Can't" is a pretty strong word.
If something isn't available for streaming, it is very likely to be available on DVD or Blu-Ray. Even if the media are region-coded, region-free players may be perfectly legal in your jurisdiction.
I keep seeing this mentioned, but seriously, it was only in 2015 the revenues bottomed out and started to rise again. And it is not anywhere close to its peak in the 90s in real terms, and less so in terms of % spending.
Globally, China's music industry make less than $100M a year. That second largest economy in the world, and its Music revenue is less than half of Thailand.
The industry has changed, and in the west Musicians made much more money in their live performance, K-Pops have all their songs on youtube for free. Chinese Pop stars get much more from advertisement deals and other media. Japanese still loves CDs. A lot of people have grown up to consume music which is totally free.
Revenue didn't bottom out. CD revenue is still on the decline, and digital revenue is still on the decline.
Ever since the age of the first recording, music has worked on a freemium model. Music was free to listen to via the radio (and ad-supported), which acted as an advertisement and upsell for physical (and later digital) media sales.
With the decline of radio and physical media, as well as the democratization of distribution (less hits, revenue spread more evenly), the music industry has been searching for a replacement business model that works.
It looks like they've found it in streaming services.
You have a tiny set of artists like Kanye who effectively own the industry and for the indies its like a $5 a year side income but they spend most of their spare time on it out of pure passion.
Is that considered piracy? YouTube quality is fine for most people (i.e. they either don't care, or don't have gear that's good enough to really hear the difference).
I spent more than 4(!) hours trying to find it... the effort ended past 3am; needless to say how.
Nothing more annoying than false supply limitations on content by service, exclusives, country, various availability windows.
This is the digital age, we have little time for entertainment and need our content on demand. I should be able pay and get what I want to listen to or watch without a false supply constraint to create manipulated demand.
I get why the content owners do it this way, content is king, it is just majorly annoying.
When movies are available on content services I end up not being into the movie at that time, then when I want to watch it the movie is only for purchase. So even with 4 streaming services I end up buying on iTunes or other.
For music, Spotify is doing a pretty good job of having almost everything, but still there are albums that you have to go buy or get.
The friction is so much less when pirating, just go get what you want, I'd pay for a service I could just get anything anytime with no restrictions, so I end up buying lots of movies especially.
Usability and access still favors pirating in many cases which isn't wise for the content industry.
Pandora first, but I can't remember if I had completely stopped using mp3 at that point. I maybe had an iPod full of music I didn't pay for. Can't really remember the timelines here.
Either way, just like with movie and TV, I'll happily pay for streaming if the selection is there.
This. A million times.
...
“Talk about missing the point. If Napster wasn’t peer-to-peer but it did let you type the name of a song and then listen to it, it would have been just as popular.”
—Joel Spolsky, “Don’t Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You,” 2001
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architect...
———
In the last 17 years, that quote keeps popping up because the companies that focus on letting you type the name of a song and listen to it right away have made money, while those that introduce friction to support some label’s business model? Not so much.
But they keep complaining about “piracy.” 90% of piracy is eliminating friction.
This past weekend, I bought the new Doctor Who on iTunes. I paid because Apple gave me a lot of ways to type the name of the show and watch it right away. Same reason I’ve spent thousands on music with them.
It’s not about the price, it’s about the convenience.
Which is why I don't. No King Crimson, no cool small alternative bands, and no good way to find out of the bands you like are on spotify before getting a subscription. Furthermore: the service pays fuck all to artists. I may as well use the money to go to their concerts and buy merch directly from the artists.
Similar organisations were until recently engaged in shakedowns of small businesses for even playing the radio. Even after this was ruled illegal in Europe we used to still get a letter every year demanding we pay up for the benefits music was bringing our business.
I don't have a bank account here, so I can't pay for a 2 year subscription for 4G. I also don't have a job. I'm grateful for my offline music collection keeping me alive right now. Music is especially important when times are tough, and it's in those difficult times that money and subscription-level stability are hard to find.
Today a Youtube playlist is often enough for me.
This doesn't make sense. A premium subscription service doesn't give you access offline, and usually won't help with cellular data caps.
[1] https://support.spotify.com/us/using_spotify/the_basics/list...
[2] https://support.apple.com/en-au/HT204839
Have a real DRM-free shop instead please. Without idiotic user unfriendly lawyer requiring license to use.
[1] https://support.google.com/googleplaymusic/answer/1250232?hl...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
Edit: Actually, now that I think about it, you might have to steal it to make the copy. Your analogy is useless for this argument. Money might be an abstract concept but bills and coins aren't imaginary. Try an analogy with digital currency then maybe there be something to talk about, but I'm guessing anything you can come up with will actually be talking about "hacking" or "fraud", not "stealing".
Why bending the meaning of words?
Musicians are stiffed by the record labels, not by the fans. The fans are the ones that keep them rich, keep them popular, buy their shirts and go to their $200/seat concerts. At worst, their records are loss-leaders for an even more lucrative business.
It used to be common practice for governments to tax owners of radios (and TV sets later on). So music certainly hasn't always been freely available on the radio.
That being said, if you're sending EM waves through my property, why the hell shouldn't I be allowed tp copy them?
To further my point: not every artist is a mega-millionaire. There are countless small bands/artists where every sale counts towards them actually earning a living off of music.
it's hardly as clear cut as you are making it. if I have an apple and you take it, I no longer have the apple. if I have five apples and you take one, I have four left. it's hard to imagine you taking something from me that I will still possess afterwards in the same quantity. I would argue that the sense in which most people use "take" does not include copying.
to further my point: the law in the US, a bastion of copyright enforcement, clearly recognizes the difference between theft (a criminal offense) and copyright infringement (a civil offense). you can't go to jail for piracy.
Presumably infinite quantities of a something like an album shouldn't suggest that it's worthless. Resources have been invested into it's creation. Artists should be able to recoup some of their investment with album sales.
If it's okay to "copy" music, than the same argument can be made for every other digital product. Games, films, and essentially all software.
when i was teenager / college student i never thought piracy was wrong, mainly because of the "well i wouldn't have paid for it anyway" argument. now that i'm a software dev, i have plenty of money for music and movies and i realize that my own livelihood depends on IP protection. i can't justify it so easily anymore.
I still buy some music even though I subscribe to Apple Music.
But if I were coming from a place where I was starting out and owned no music, I might think differently.
Apply your logic to any other purchase and it falls on it feet. Do you only buy food direct from farmers? Clothes from factories? Do you only use supermarkets that use open source payment kiosks?
I bet they really care about about the software license for the source code for the store you buy their music from...
Maybe try just enjoying music for musics sake and not thinking about where it comes from to much, you might enjoy it!
https://yougov.co.uk/news/2018/08/02/number-britons-illegall...
NewPipe (A free lightweight YouTube frontend for Android.) - https://f-droid.org/app/org.schabi.newpipe